The OpportunityAllara is hiring its first Director of Data to build the backbone of how the company collects, models, governs, and uses data. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, this is a hands-on leadership role: in your first months you will be in the pipelines yourself, cleaning up our ETL, consolidating duplicated logic, and closing gaps in our source data. Over time you will define and drive the company's longer-term data strategy, set the standards the rest of the organization builds on, and grow the data function as Allara scales. This is a player-coach role, senior enough to own strategy and still happy to get the pipelines right yourself, and the hands-on work comes first.
Location: Hybrid (NYC). We value in-person collaboration and aim for at least three days per week in our NYC office, with flexibility as needed.
Your Impact- Make Allara's data trustworthy, so every team can make decisions on numbers they believe.
- Turn a fragmented, duplicated data setup into one reliable source of truth with traceable lineage.
- Define the data strategy that lets Allara scale its use of data, from AI-assisted analysis across departments and leveraging health data to drive better outcomes.
- Build and lead the data engineering function over time.
- Partner with Product, Growth, Finance, Strategy, and Clinical as the owner of the shared data platform and standards.
ResponsibilitiesFirst 6 to 12 months (hands-on)- Clean up the pipelines. Audit our existing ETL across Fivetran and Mozart into Snowflake, stabilize reliability and freshness, and fix the brittle parts the business has learned to work around.
- Consolidate duplication. Collapse duplicated models, metrics, and transformation logic into a single, well-documented modeling layer, so there is one definition of each number rather than several that disagree.
- Close source-data gaps. Map what we collect against what the business needs and close the gaps across our systems.
- Make the data trustworthy. Stand up data-quality testing, monitoring, and alerting.
- Establish one source of truth. Define a canonical metric and semantic layer
Ongoing (strategy and ownership)- Own the data strategy. Shape how Allara collects, models, governs, and uses data as the company scales, and advises leadership on tooling, investments, and build-versus-buy decisions.
- Own governance and compliance. Own data governance, access control, and PHI and PII handling appropriate for a HIPAA-covered healthcare environment.
- Own the shared platform. Serve departmental stakeholders and data analysts, as the owner of the platform and standards they build on, and enable trustworthy self-serve analytics.
- Own AI-ready data. Own the shared, AI-ready data layer and the canonical terminology definitions and skills that power AI-assisted analysis across departments.
- Build the team. Hire, mentor, and lead the data engineering function over time, setting the technical bar and the practices the team works by.
Required Qualifications- 8+ years in data engineering or analytics engineering, including direct, recent ownership of production ETL and warehouse modeling.
- Strong SQL and a cloud warehouse (Snowflake preferred), ETL tooling, and a transformation and modeling layer.
- A proven track record of taking over brittle, duplicated, or undocumented pipelines and turning them into reliable, documented, trusted data.
- Strong data modeling fundamentals and a real bias toward a single source of truth.
- Experience designing data governance and handling sensitive data, with comfort around security and access control in a regulated environment.
Preferred Qualifications- Healthcare or HIPAA experience, including familiarity with EMR data (FHIR) and claims.
- Experience with D2C growth metrics
- Experience with Amplitude and product event taxonomy, and enabling AI or LLM-assisted analytics such as semantic layers, metric catalogs, or Claude skills.
- Experience building and managing a data team at a high-growth startup (Series B to D).
Having these would be advantageous over candidates lacking these qualifications and would potentially allow the candidate to have a greater and/or more immediate impact on the role.
What Allara OffersCompensation & Career Growth- $220,000-$250,000 with opportunities for advancement
- Equity
- Professional development & employee learning programs
Actual compensation will be determined based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to: candidate experience, location, education, certifications, and skill set. In addition to base salary, our total compensation package includes equity, comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision), generous paid time off, and additional wellness and professional development perks.
Work Environment & Flexibility- 100% remote within the U.S./or 3-day hybrid in NYC
- Unlimited PTO & 11 company holidays/ or L1 offerings
Health & Wellness- Medical, dental, and vision benefits
- Health Savings Account (HSA) & Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
- Long- and short-term disability coverage
- Annual employee wellness stipend
Family & Future Planning- 401(k) plan
- Parental leave & family planning support benefits
Additional Perks- Company-issued laptop
- Annual work-from-home stipend
- Commuter benefits (if applicable)
- A collaborative, mission-driven culture focused on improving patient care
